Abstract

Declining market prices make it necessary to reduce supply costs of forest chips to ensure profitability in the supply chain and a continued supply of forest chips to the energy industry. Comminution and transport are two of the major contributors to the total costs in the forest fuel supply system. In order to fully utilise truck payloads and reduce transport costs, logging residues are usually chipped at the landing. For the chipping contractor, it is important to maximise the proportion of effective work time in relation to scheduled work time. Currently it is not uncommon that effective work time is less than 50 per cent of scheduled work time, due to chip transports using the chipper, waiting for chip trucks, and other delays. Increased chipper utilisation requires greater coordination between the chipper and the chip trucks transporting the produced chips to the customer. Supply systems have been simulated to examine how transport distance, number of trucks, shift scheduling and chip buffers affect the system costs for a high-performance chipper system. System costs and machine utilisation vary greatly, depending on system configuration. It is always beneficial to have six containers in the buffer on the landing rather than three, and trucks should begin their shifts at one-hour intervals. To maximise chipper use and minimise system costs, four container trucks are needed if the transport distance exceeds 50 km. However, the large seasonal fluctuations in demand for biomass chips makes it hard to fully utilise the potential of the system over the whole year. The study concludes that it is important to regard chipping and chip transport as one operation, not two separate ones, as they are so dependent on each other.

Keywords

Forest fuel; Biomass; Supply chain; Comminution; Transport

Published in

Applied Energy
2017, Volume: 185, number: Part 1, pages: 497–505

SLU Authors

• Eriksson, Anders

  • Department of Energy and Technology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Sustainable Development Goals

Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all


UKÄ Subject classification

Energy Systems


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2016.10.136

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/77959